The Women Reframe American Landscape exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art is yet another in a litany of Guerrilla Girl muggings of vulnerable and weakling American Art institutions. In this case, they co-opt valuable museum wall space with disingenuous curation and intent.
The pretense of this exhibition claims that Suzie M. Barstow is having a first retrospective (woo hoo!) and the reason is that, well, she provides the plausible pretense that the Ever-Victimized American Woman Artist can be tightly coupled to a male group of painters who became known as the Hudson River School.
The problem with this disingenuous marketing backbone is that Barstow's art constitutes less than half of the show though her work recognizably has something observably having to do with what I hope we can agree upon is landscape.
The lion's share of this show however is a crapscape of identity politic drivel that no legitimate aesthetic gatekeeper for a museum should ever allow this junk pile of nonsense to occupy. This is not a recentering of women anywhere. This is a multi-gallery spaced petri dish for the cultivation of the Woke Mind Virus whose anti-intellectual tentacles are strangling fine art appreciation on a global scale.
By now our shared bullshit detectors are all tingling at the same time. We are are being told straight faced that George Orwell warned you about these weasel words deployed from the mouths of politicians.
Everything the project claims not to attempt, it attempts pathetically to accomplish over and over and over. Let's put a clothespin on our noses and start with the Guerrilla Girls entry.
Yes. Yes. We are led to believe that the GGs"were galvanized by research and statistics" on women *in* the Hudson River School and something about reality. One can only image a bat-signal like beacon shining from the campus art building declaring "Guerrilla Girls Assemble!" - we need a poster!
And so a poster was manufactured. These posters represent one of a number of defamatory techniques that are standard fare for projects such as these. The white male artist(s) who will get mugged need to be softened up patriarchal style. They must be held responsible for 21st century progressive Democrat, politically correct expectations about neo-history. The ritual dry-humping of their previous reputations by the Guerrilla Girls is perfunctory to make the neglected, historically abused, and otherwise victim's victim to look that much more *marginalized*.
In their "poster" they take an axe to the HRS artists.
The allegedly criminal behavior of the Hudson River School painters were that they were an all-white, all-male, who shared a cohort of patrons. Aiiiiieeeeeee! This was about the time of the civil war.
So Edward Mitchell Bannister lived and worked in the Boston, MA/Providence, RI geography not the Hudson.
Robert Duncanson is considered a second-generation member of the Hudson River School (typical of GG "research"). He too might be geographically challenged in having a beer on the Hudson because he worked in Ohio. From Wikipedia before the thought police eliminate the reference: "Inspired by famous American landscape artists like Thomas Cole, Duncanson created renowned landscape paintings and is considered a second generation Hudson River School artist.["
The Guerrilla Girls successfully use race-baiting to promote the smashing of the patriarchy that is point of these projects. But their poster couples even more allegations worth deflating.
Again, Guerrilla Girl scholarship is nonexistent in these allegations. The Hudson River School art is more or less a romanticized vision of an American Eden along the river. The *noble indigenous indian* rhetoric is a magical thinking, manufactured historical narrative. The American continent was not populated by millions of nation park natives who performed any such inhabitation, cultivation, or protection (from what?).
Indians, like all of the rest of humanity, exercised their culture and governance all over the Americas. the migration of Europeans to the Americas changed that. The unspoken truth is that innumerable wars have been fought on this continent against fellow European governments and against Indian populations. The art of Hudson River School painters has nothing to do with any of that.
Indians were not relocated to the moon. They relocated to continental reservations where they run casinos, watch TV, and vote.
Nobody is immune to disease. Sexually transmitted diseases from Indians afflicted Europeans. The likely disease being implied by this photograph is malaria that sickened everyone it afflicted.
The United States judicial system is better place than an art museum to established claims of ownership. The GG unsubstantiated allegations that these claims have any legitimacy is based on a romantic fantasy that history can be unwound to somehow undo what's done. To criticize the romanticism of the HRS painters for human progress is a fool's errand but the Guerrilla Girls are promoting this grift as plausible truth. It's not.
The photograph used in this indictment poster is by Seneca Ray Stoddard who photographically documented the industrialization of the Hudson not necessarily its eventual degradation at the hands of masses of tourists and commercial arts and crafts landscape painters such as those featured in this show. A show of his photography would be a breath of fresh air here.
And their conclusions about the area becoming a mess is predictably inaccurate as well - profoundly so. A Bill Moyers PBS show on the Hudson documents the GG inaccuracy.
